In
1880 a change began and continued until in 1910 less than one-third of
the 267,000 foreign born were of northern European extraction. In 1870
there were only 306 Slavs and Italians in the entire region; in 1890
there were 43,000; in 1909 there were 89,000; and in 1910 the number
increased to 178,000.
Today these immigrants from the south of Europe have virtually
displaced the miner from the north. They have rooted out the decencies
and comforts of the earlier operatives and have supplanted them with
the promiscuity, the filth, and the low economic standards of the
medieval peasant. There are no more desolate and distressing places in
America than the miserable mining "patches" clinging like lichens to
the steep hill sides or secluded in the valleys of Pennsylvania In the
bituminous fields conditions are no better. In the town of Windber in
western Pennsylvania, for example, some two thousand experienced
English and American miners were engaged in opening the veins in 1897.
No sooner were the mines in operation than the south European began to
drift in. Today he outnumbers and underbids the American and the north
European. He lives in isolated sections, reeking with everything that
keeps him a "foreigner" in the heart of America. The coal regions of
Virginia, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois and the ore
regions of northern Michigan and Minnesota are rapidly passing under
the same influence.
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